By the time of the Somethin’ Else session, Cannonball’s sound had considerably more nuance, with darker tones and more brooding solos. Nonetheless, the Parker influence continued to shine, and the whole session has a sense of relaxation that results in music that is truly joyous. Julian “Cannonball” Adderley burst upon the jazz scene in 1955, […]
MILES DAVIS Prestige Profiles Vol. 1
All of the material here was recorded by Miles Davis for Prestige between 1953 and 1956. After initially recording some Prestige dates in 1951, Davis cut two recordings for Blue Note in ’53, then rejoined Prestige, where he recorded the session that closes this disc in May of 1953. “When Lights Are Low” features Davis […]
MILES DAVIS Kind of Blue Legacy Edition Columbia Legacy
The second disc is a nice coupling of five sessions from the previous year, 1958, with the same group. These sessions have appeared through the years on a number of different recordings and were previously collected together on the 6 CD Miles Davis & John Coltrane: The Complete Columbia Recordings 1955-1961 in 2000. This Legacy […]
The Complete Jack Johnson Sessions: Bringing Miles’s Rock and Roll/Funk Fantasia into Focus
The Complete Jack Johnson Sessions represents a stunning crossroads where boxing, the Black Power movement, the development of rock music as an expression of vast changes in American society, the electronic amplification of jazz, and Miles Davis all came together. That the music heard on this newly-released 5 CD set was boiled down to a […]
MILES DAVIS THE COMPLETE MILES DAVIS AT MONTREUX Sony/Legacy THE SECRET HISTORY OF MILES DAVIS IN THE 1980s
The Complete Miles Davis at Montreux is, at first glance, a daunting proposition: 20 CDs that do nothing less than document every performance the legendary trumpet player gave at the famed Montreux Jazz Festival, spanning the years from 1973 until 1991, the year of Davis’ death. Since Davis performed at the festival for the first […]
MILES DAVIS In Person: Friday & Saturday Night at the Blackhawk, Complete (4 CD Box Set)
Miles Davis’s Friday and Saturday night performances at the Blackhawk in San Francisco in the spring of 1961 are simply great jazz. Though the group he leads here has not generally received much play because they were a working band and didn’t record anything as groundbreaking as Kind of Blue or the succession of albums […]
LATE NIGHT THOUGHTS ON MILES DAVIS
I Miles Davis did not think of himself, first and foremost, as an entertainer. He clearly despised all the things that older jazz musicians took for granted, like playing music that would entertain a predominantly white audience, “walking the bar”, etc. It was this that probably caused him to align himself with the bebop crowd […]
MILES DAVIS
Miles Davis is more than a jazz musician: he is a cultural icon, known even to people who can’t tell bebop from fusion. That may seem strange considering that Davis made a career of defying the expectations of critics and audience alike, but it is just one more paradox associated with this mercurial artist. Miles […]